Deep Energy Retrofits

Context

NYSERDA hired this Level Infrastructure-led team to support New York State’s goal of increasing the energy-efficiency of high-rise buildings. Specifically, NYSERDA’s goal in this project was to help the owners & tenants of tall commercial office buildings realize the technical & economic feasibility of achieving carbon-reduction targets established by New York City and New York State. After an extensive global search for compelling demonstration projects, Level identified 18 high-rise office buildings from around the world which had undergone a deep energy retrofit and could prove they achieved energy savings by sharing pre- & post-retrofit metered energy data. Level interviewed these buildings’ owners or project engineers to understand the details of each retrofit project, and then developed a report profiling retrofit technologies, approaches, and lessons learned for each building.

Our Role

Level Infrastructure led the project team which included Building Energy Exchange and Sustainable Energy Partnerships. As the primary research lead, Level staff interviewed dozens of owners, designers, and tenants in North America, Europe, and Japan to find the best examples of energy-saving retrofits with public energy data available. Level organized and conducted a series of workshops convening experts on low-energy retrofit design & implementation to ensure the project findings captured global best-practices and the most relevant case studies possible. Level also prepared and managed the creation of the final deliverable.

Our Approach

This research project was conducted in order to support NYSERDA’s $30 million Empire Building Retrofit Challenge, a program designed to demonstrate scalable and replicable solutions for high-profile commercial and multi-family buildings across the State. Level Infrastructure understood that a degree of skepticism existed within the commercial real estate community about the technical & financial feasibility of achieving the level of deep energy savings required by NYC’s LL97. Because of this, Level was determined to present the findings of this research in a way that would be helpful and compelling to the NYC real estate community, so as to demonstrate to the real estate community that deep energy retrofits are indeed feasible.

Project Highlights

After completing the data gathering portion of this project, Level Infrastructure and its partners began to recognize patterns in the ways that building owners had gone about giving their buildings deep energy retrofits. Four typical retrofit approaches were highlighted in the report, along with a comprehensive menu of energy conservation measures that are available to building owners. A path forward was also highlighted.